Why LITTLE

Ah well, this stuff is written in kinda Pigean English ... this is all I can.
I hope you can bear it, dear visitor, and have some fun while reading.
Anyway, be welcome!

In the beginning there are two questions:


Why another obscure programming language?
Why a blog for an obscure programming language, which nobody knows, and nobody cares about?

Well, maybe I can't give reasonable answers on either questions.

But I can tell of the personal motivation which made me create both language and blog anyway. ;)

LITTLE is a toy project - one of unnumbered such projects around the world, driven by pure interest, curiosity and enthusiasm of many many authors. Complete operating systems have been created that way.
So I'm in good company.

It started as experiment - I wanted to understand, how multiple inheritance can be implemented within an interpreted language, and more important, how it can be done efficiently. First of all, I wanted to find out, if _I_ can implement it.

I deliberately wanted to reinvent the wheel - possibly without looking at other wheels to much. I did not want to reimplement strategies of others - I wanted to find my own algorithms, no matter if they were especially naive or cunning. From time to time I find it interesting to see whether I still can come up with some plan that works. ;)

The project was in contemplate-about-it state for a long time, before I actually launched it and wrote the first bits of a VM and a LITTLE compiler for it. Surprisingly fast, I had a first functional version ... and suddenly loads of ideas for further enhancements.
Rather quickly development advanced - I wrote a basic class hierarchy, IO libraries and stuff, and not too much later, a LITTLE compiler written in LITTLE itself (okay, it took me a while, but this is now several years in the past, and thus the duration I recall shrinked a bit).
I added a just-in-time compiler targetting my now obsolete favourite platform SGI Irix on MIPS CPUs, and some basic graphics stuff (GL bindings, a bit of Motif).

Now, there it is.
I don't put much effort in it lately. There are other time-consuming interests of me, too ... and unfortunately I somehow have to earn some money too.
But I decided to revive it a bit - at least, to keep it alive.

So, this blog had to be born.

I will post ideas, announcement, bugfixes, sample code and whatever I feel to post about LITTLE here, whenever I feel to post it. You're welcome to read and comment ... or leave and do something better. ;)

Your sincerely,
Helmut S. aka thalion